Our goal is increasing the users’ value and experience and decreasing the implementation time for web portals. To achieve this goal we adopt a subject-centric perspective on information architecture. The fundament of this approach is that portals should be driven by subject-centric models of the portals’ domains. Out of these domain models, the interaction and interface design of the portals is self-evident. Amongst others, the international industry standard Topic Maps is a portal technology and an implementation of the subject-centric modelling paradigm. With ActiveTM we introduce a technology, which implements a Model-driven approach to automatically create domain-customised, subject-centric portal engines, based on Topic Maps. Extending ActiveTM, Information Shapes provide domain-specific views of the ActiveTM data, increasing the reusability of view components. ActiveTM and Information Shapes have proved as techniques for reducing the implementation cost of portals enormously and the implied subject-centricness increases the users value and experience significantly.

Topic Maps is an excellent paradigm to support human thinking and to visualize networked information. As part of my PhD project, I therefore chose Topic Maps as the conceptual foundation for designing and implementing a software prototype for semantic knowledge retrieval.